Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth: A Love Story

Is Shakespeare's darkest tragedy a cautionary tale about ambition? a bit of Jacobean mythmaking?  Or is it the portrait of a deeply committed marriage gone catastrophically wrong?

With apologies for all the appalling accents . . . .

Performance Clip: Macbeth with Orson Welles, Fay Bainter, and the Mercury Acting Co.  Mercury Text Records.  From the Internet Archive (archive.org)

Additional Music: "The Rout of Moy" perf. Albannach.  2006.  From the Internet Archive (archive.org)

Transcript

All hail, Litterbugs!  Hail to thee, thanes of the Clubhouse!  Welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, where rhyme gets its reason.  On the show today, Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy, a play chronicling the relentless drive to blood, madness, and hell, a play so cursed one is forbidden to utter its name in a theatre.  Superstitious thespians will only call it “the Scottish play,” but you know that I am talking about the Tragedy of Macbeth.

It is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, the entire script is not much longer than Hamlet’s part alone in that play.  The Bard offers an economic, tightly-paced, relentless descent into the most monstrous regions of the human psyche.  It is a place of blindness, will, ruthlessness, desire, and one of profound loss, profound desperation.  

Macbeth hits the stage in 1606, the third year of the reign of James I, who while James VI of Scotland became the monarch of England in 1603, upon the death of Good Queen Bess.  James became the official patron for Shakespeare’s theatre company, and so the Lord Chamberlain’s Men became the King’s Men – looks rather flashier on the shingle.  

But while Shakespeare and co. were pleased with the new prestige, not everyone in England welcomed James.  We mentioned the succession crisis a few times on the poddie, that great national anxiety attending an aging queen with no clear heirs.  Catholics, particularly, hoped to get a monarch somewhat more tolerant of their religion, one who might ease some of the Tudor restrictions and proscriptions.  Alas, Jamie is nae yer man.  At the opening of Parliament in 1604, he declared: “I acknowledge the Roman Church to be our mother church, although defiled with some infirmities and corruptions...Let [the Papists] assure themselves, that, as I am a friend of their persons, if they be good subjects, so am I a vowed enemy, and do denounce mortal war to their errors.”  And so we get the Gunpowder Plot.

Know ye not of the Gunpowder Plot?  Well, pour yourself a nice cup of cocoa and I’ll tell you.  It  was a failed conspiracy to assassinate King James and the whole Parliament on November 5, 1605. The conspirators, a group of English Catholics led by Robert Catesby, planned to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament, killing the king and key government officials. One of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes, collected 36 barrels of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords.  However, an anonymous letter sent to Lord Monteagle, a member of that august body, warning him to stay away from the opening session tipped off the ever-vigilant security services, who conducted a search of the cellar and discovered Fawkes guarding the barrels. Fawkes, utterly failing to produce a convincingly innocent reason why he should be guarding 36 barrels of powder in Parliament’s root cellar, was arrested and tortured, revealed the details of the conspiracy and named names.  The conspirators were captured, tried for treason, and executed in the traditionally ghastly manner.  Remember remember the 5th of November!

What’s this to do with Macbeth?  Well, I’ll tell you that, too.  The play concerns the assassination of a Scottish king and the moral and political chaos that follows.  In doing so, it celebrates the ascension of the new Stuart dynasty and its victory over such chaos.  Shakespeare adapts several tales concerning 11th century Scottish history taken from Holinshed’s Chronicles, embroidering bits to make the Stuart succession seem fore-ordained.  

But I don’t wish to imply that Shakespeare is a mere political toady here.  While a good sucking-up to a king is a sound strategy for keeping body and soul together, our William is not some Ministry of Truth propagandist.  He does create something of a foundation myth for Great Britain – James’ vision of a united England and Scotland – but the play is no partisan bumper sticker.

To begin with, the play is hardly triumphalist.  Yes, it’s a Renaissance tragedy so we know that Macbeth will die and that the rightful king will rule in the end, but Shakespeare doesn’t offer any pageantry for that.  The play ends on the battlefield, the characters blood-soaked and mud-stained and exhausted – spiritually and physically.  The title character’s head is on a pike.  The closing scene’s brutality oppresses.

How do we get to this end?  Rather rapidly, actually, in dramatic terms.

The play begins more strangely than it ends.  There is none of the gentlemanly banter that frequently opens Shakespeare’s plays.  Instead, we are taken to a blasted wasteland in the midst of a wild storm.  There, we see three otherworldly women – are they witches? – muttering and chanting to themselves.  Their language is strange:

When shall we three meet again?

 In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

 When the hurly-burly’s done,

 When the battle’s lost and won.

There’s no stately blank verse here on the heath: this four-beat line is more vulgar, it’s a folk-rhythm, it sounds like a spell.  They are conjuring a meeting with Macbeth, then chant: “Fair is foul and foul is fair!  Hover through the fog and filthy air!”

By line 10 of the play, Shakespeare insists on a thorough-going ambiguity. In this short scene, the witches utter two paradoxes.  

What, you may ask, is a paradox?  Two doctors.  Ha ha.  A paradigm?  20 cents.  No, paradox is a rhetorical figure which presents itself as contradictory, but turns out to be true.  For instance, the witches say they will meet Macbeth “when the battle’s lost and won.”  At first, one may think, how can a battle be both lost and won?  Then one considers more deliberately : well, you could win the battle but lose the war.  Or you could win the battle but lose many of your soldiers.  Or, one side wins and one side loses.  Aha!  What seemed contradictory turns out to be quite true and, in fact, demands that we consider the problem from a number of angles.

Now, the paradox Shakespeare drops on line 10 – “fair is foul and foul is fair” – sums up the whole play.  Fair here can mean just, equal, good, or beautiful and foul unjust, unequal, evil, or ugly.  It’s great fodder for that old English class theme chestnut: appearance versus reality, appearances are deceiving – because, yeah, that’s kind of what it means. Don’t trust what you see – what appears good may be bad.   But if we push the idea further, we can argue that moral or value polarities are reversed, inverted.  That what we think is good is actually bad, that we value the wrong things.  But at its extreme, the line posits that there is no distinction between these apparently oppositional values – not only that one cannot be separated from another (as we like to think) but that they are monistic.  The line says that it’s all the same thing.  Fair and foul are false categories.

This, I think, is the most troubling idea the play presents.  Be on the lookout for variations on the paradox – contradiction, category collapse, indeterminacy. 

The next scene takes place after the hurley-burly’s done.  There has been a terrific battle by which Scottish rebels under a traitor named Macdonwald, in coordination with the Norwegian army assisted by a treacherous Thane of Cawdor, have attempted King Duncan’s overthrow.  Forces seemed evenly matched until the Thane of Glamis, Macbeth, comes on the scene.  The captain provides a graphic report of Macbeth’s defeat of Macdonwald:

For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name),

 Disdaining Fortune, with his brandished steel,

 Which smoked with bloody execution,

 Like Valor’s minion, carved out his passage

 Till he faced the slave;

 Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,

 Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops,

 And fixed his head upon our battlements.

The image of a seasoned Scottish warrior literally carving his way through a column, with his sword smoking with bloody execution – smoking figuratively like he’s making fast, devastating work against the enemies, but probably also smoking literally in that human blood is 98.6 degrees and the air is cold in Scotland – this savage meets the foe, actually cuts him in half up to the jaw, decapitates him, and slams the head on a spear.  This is our introduction to Macbeth, evidently a man capable of great violence, possessed of great strength and courage, a man not squeamish at the sight of blood, who defends the civic, social, and natural order of things – a loyal, patriotic soldier.  And following the captain’s report, the Thane of Ross arrives to announce that Macbeth has successfully turned aside the invasion by Norway and that the traitor Thane of Cawdor has been captured.  Duncan is, of course, suitably impressed.  He condemns Cawdor to death and orders that the title be awarded to Macbeth.

Since the battle’s over, we return to the witches, who chat about killing pigs, hassling sailor’s wives, and cursing their husbands with 81 weeks of insomnia, the first of the play’s many references to sleep and sleeplessness.  Then, Macbeth and his comrade Banquo enter, and the protagonist’s first words in the play are: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”  Right, Shakespeare’s being about as subtle as a neon sledgehammer between the legs – Macbeth’s first words repeat the witches’ paradox.  He’s capable of recognizing nuance and ambiguity at this point in the play.  That ability will deteriorate sharply as we go on and is, I think, perhaps the main catalyst to his eventual downfall.  

Anyway, they happen upon the witches who greet them: 

All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!

 All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!

 All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!

Now, pay attention here – these are the prophecies that put Macbeth on the path to destruction.  Imagine that I’ve put “prophecies” in scare quotes.  They don’t really say much, do they?  The first merely identifies Macbeth – he actually is Thane of Glamis.  The second – thane of Cawdor – has been accomplished but he doesn’t know about it yet.  The third?  Well, that does seem a bit predictive, but note that it offers nothing else – doesn’t say how or when or why.  

There’s some question as to whether the Witches actually have supernatural, prophetic powers or if they simply trigger Macbeth’s latent ambition.  Your view will depend upon whether or not you think Macbeth has ever considered the kingship before.  Some will say no, he hasn’t, that he recognizes his place as a thane to the king, that that place is ordained by a divine or cosmic justice, and that he happily performs his duties according to that justice.  I suppose that’s possible.  He does go into a daze.  Banquo even asks – repeating the paradox again: “Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear things that do sound so fair?”  Why, indeed?

I confess that I think Macbeth has long coveted the throne.  Why is he afraid here?  Because he hears a validation of some dark fantasy he’s harbored.  When Ross arrives, announcing Macbeth’s elevation as Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth ponders on the implications: 

This supernatural soliciting

 Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,

 Why hath it given me earnest of success

 Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.

 If good, why do I yield to that suggestion

 Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

 And make my seated heart knock at my ribs

 Against the use of nature? Present fears

 Are less than horrible imaginings.

 My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

 Shakes so my single state of man

 That function is smothered in surmise,

 And nothing is but what is not.

Did you hear all the paradoxical language there?  Already, Macbeth is fantasizing about assassination.  Remember he was cutting men in half like 10 minutes ago for Duncan and now he contemplates regicide.  Feels to me like the brass ring he’s waited for for years is finally coming round.

What about Banquo, you ask?  Well, so does he.  He says:”If you can look into the seeds of time And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak, then, to me.”  The witches proceed to say that he will be lesser than Macbeth, but greater.  Not so happy, yet much happier.  He will father kings though he will not be one himself.  Macbeth fails to register that this means his dynasty, if it ever exists, must be exceeding short.

But I’d like to point out a feature of Banquo’s language here.  He uses horticultural images and metaphors when asking for a prophecy of his future.  He refers to “seeds,” and “grains” and growing.  Frequently throughout the text, Banquo speaks or is spoken of in such plant metaphors.  A fitting motif – one of fertility and futurity – for one who is prophesied to beget a line of kings.

And while we’re at it, allow me to point out that Macbeth has his own motif – clothing.  He frequently speaks or is spoken of in clothing images:  he asks Ross when he receives the thaneship of Cawdor: “Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?” and Banquo comments: “New honors come upon him,  Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mold But with the aid of use.”  Borrowed robes, strange garments – things that don’t fit.  And clothing hides us, doesn’t it?  Makes us appear differently than we are.  The word “naked” is often employed as a metaphor for honesty or authenticity – the naked truth.  

And, if I may be allowed to belabor a point, clothing is also something peculiar to humans, it is a hallmark of civilization. Animals don’t wear clothes - well, except for those poor little lap dogs that old matrons wrap in gaudy little sweaters.  Poor buggers.  Anyway, I think that perhaps odd notion comes up later.

In the next rather brief scene, Duncan officially recognizes his eldest son Malcolm as the heir to the throne.  Now that that throne seems secure, it is meet that the Prince of Cumberland be declared.  Just before this official announcement, however, Duncan’s speeches to Banquo and Macbeth employ some interesting language.  He says:

Welcome hither.

 I have begun to plant thee and will labor

 To make thee full of growing.—Noble Banquo,

 That hast no less deserved nor must be known

 No less to have done so, let me enfold thee

 And hold thee to my heart.

Note the gardening images – planting and growing.  But also note that these are directed to Macbeth.  He then changes his address to noble Banquo, who replies, “There, if I grow,

 The harvest is your own.”  I find this perhaps minor exchange interesting because Duncan misapplies the gardening or farming motif,  He addresses it to Macbeth, whom we already know has a quite stunted future – there is no growing here.

Which gets me wondering about Duncan’s abilities as a king.  Clearly, we are to understand him as a good man, but if you think about it, in the short time we’ve known him, he has weathered two rebellions: one by Macdonwald and another by the thane of Cawdor.  And after the latter’s execution, Duncan makes this rather equivocal statement: 

There’s no art

 To find the mind’s construction in the face.

 He was a gentleman on whom I built

 An absolute trust.

I used the word equivocal advisedly: it means that something is open to more than one interpretation, something ambiguous.  What is Duncan saying here?  Is he saying that there’s no way of knowing what someone’s thinking just by looking at their face?  If so, it fits rather nicely with our fair is foul conundrum.  Or is he saying there’s no trick to knowing what someone’s thinking – you just have to look at their face.  In this case, we get a rather naive ruler who is incapable of understanding the ambitious motivations of those around him, a ruler who might be constantly threatened with treachery.  Does he not see that his new thane of Cawdor is as perfidious as his predecessor?  The notion of equivocation – meaning something other than what you say – will saturate the rest of the play.

As Duncan has decided to retire to Inverness, the site of Macbeth’s fortress, the unfaithful war hero rides out to alert his wife of the royal visit.  We meet her reading his letter – basically a “the weirdest thing happened to me on the way home from work today, honey”  kind of thing.  Couple of things are interesting about this: 1) Lady Macbeth is reading a letter.  That means, obviously, that she’s literate, she’s educated, a very rare thing in 1606, a literate woman, and presumably moreso in the 11th century Scotland in which our story is set.  This is a woman of considerable rank and accomplishment.  2) in the letter, Macbeth refers to her as his “dearest partner of greatness.”  This may seem unremarkable to 21st century ears, but in the 17th and, indeed, the 11th centuries, a man clearly recognizing his wife’s equality to him as a person would have been most jarring.  It’s something of a critical commonplace to note that the Macbeths are really the only portrait of a committed married couple in the whole Shakespeare oeuvre – as main characters, anyway.  And this is a marriage that is indeed based on mutual love, desire, and respect.

Her reaction to that letter is most telling.  She says that Macbeth will indeed be king someday, but that she fears his nature: 

It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness

 To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,

 Art not without ambition, but without

 The illness should attend it. 

OK, hang on.  She’s afraid her husband is too nice to seize the crown by assassination.  Cast your mind back, dear listener, to moments ago when the captain reported Macdonwald’s death on the battlefield.  Macbeth literally sliced the man in half, chopped off his head, and impaled it.  Lady M thinks that’s too soft.  Oh, my God.  What a woman.

Also do make a note that she casts this softness in the language of nursing, that is, breastfeeding.  An explicitly motherly – and thus female – image.  Macbeth is too nurturing.  As Banquo has his plants and Macbeth his clothes, Lady Macbeth has milk.  She frequently speaks in images of children, milk, nursing, and parenting.

We then witness her harrowing prayer to the forces of darkness, a petition to be unsexed, that is, to be made more like a man, to accomplish her aim:

Come, you spirits

 That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

 And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

 Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.

 Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,

 That no compunctious visitings of nature

 Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

 Th’ effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts

 And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,

 Wherever in your sightless substances

 You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night,

 And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

 That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

 Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

 To cry “Hold, hold!”

Again, she invokes her “woman’s breasts” and her mother’s milk.  She endorses what we would see as a fairly retrograde belief in gender roles: women are emotional, weak, caring, nurturing, compassionate, while men are stoic, strong, ruthless, and violent.  Fair is foul.  She will exploit this traditional binary as she urges Macbeth on. 

When her husband arrives, she makes it clear that she will take charge of the murder, trying to urge her little boy on to greatness.  She tells him to “Look like th’ innocent  flower,  But be the serpent under ’t.”  Look fair, be foul.  The serpent, clearly, is an allusion to the Fall of Man story in the Book of Genesis, in which Eve, tempted by the serpent, ate of the tree of Knowledge because she wished to be wise, knowing, like God.  She didn’t want, as we might put it now, to settle, to stay in her lane.  She wanted to be better, greater.  It’s a nice touch from the old Bard there, that parallel.

However, Macbeth remains unconvinced.  In the act’s final scene, he soliloquizes about the pros and cons of the plan.  On the con side, he could be damned.  He could be discovered and executed.  He could be assassinated himself by setting such a precedent.  Duncan is his king.  Duncan is his cousin.  Duncan is his guest.

Etiquette tip of the day: do not kill your house guests in their sleep.  Puts others on edge and further invitations will not be reciprocated.  I won’t make that mistake three times.

And . . . and. . . Duncan is a nice guy.  The angels will weep for him and Macbeth will look even worse for having whacked out everybody’s Grandpa.   

On the pro side:  “I wanna.”  His only motivation is his “vaulting ambition.”  Lady M had mentioned his ambition in her scene, but she’s not so sure it vaults, obviously.

And you know what?  I’m not either.  “Ambition” is the go-to answer for Macbeth’s tragic flaw and the critics’ favorite reason for the whole mess, but actually, I’m not thoroughly convinced.  More on that later.

Right, he decides to back out and Lady Macbeth is furious.  She questions his manhood repeatedly, intimating that she could not love such a weak coward.  He rebuts her: “I dare do all that may become a man!  Who dares do more is none!”  Here, the word “become” means suitable for, appropriate to.  Who goes beyond what is appropriate for a man isn’t one any more.  What is he?  The good lady implies the answer: “What beast was it then, that made you break this enterprise to me?”  Macbeth believes he would be an animal if he went through with this.  Lady Macbeth believes men should be animals.  She taunts him with maybe the most savage image in the play.  She says:

I have given suck, and know

 How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.

 I would, while it was smiling in my face,

 Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

 And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you

 Have done to this.

If I had promised to kill my child for you, Macbeth, I would have done so.  But did you hear the verb tense in that first line?  “Have given.”  Grammar nerds will know that that is the present perfect tense, which indicates a past action that has consequences in the present.  This means that Lady Macbeth once had a child, and once nursed, but clearly does not anymore.  She has lost that child.  To what extent may post-traumatic stress or post-partum depression or something inform her demonic willingness to be unsexed?

Was it Macbeth’s child?  Don’t know.  Wouldn’t think so given the personal, possessive language.  Maybe this was a previous marriage.  That was the case historically.  The real Lady Macbeth, a woman named Gruach, watched as her children were slaughtered before her during a raid.  Her husband died in that action, too, so she hitched her wagon to this up and coming thane of Glamis.

Though it certainly could be his, too, in the play, I mean, the speech is elastic enough.  And combining the loss of a child with the ungodly trauma of tearing men to pieces for a living and you could see where Macbeth may be prone to some psychotic breaks.

Anyway, they settle on a plan: get the guards drunk.  When they black out, steal their daggers and kill the king.  Frame the guards.  Live happily ever after.

Good plan.

Macbeth agrees, but on his way to do the deed he starts hallucinating: 

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

 The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

 I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

 Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

 To feeling as to sight?

The imaginary dagger points toward Duncan’s chamber and Macbeth follows.  He calls the dagger at one point a “fatal vision” and that is telling, given our thoughts about ambiguity and equivocation.  Fatal could mean deadly – yes, it’s a deadly weapon.  But here it could also mean fated, destined.  It may be the vision that fulfills the prophecy.  In this way, is Macbeth really culpable?  If he’s just playing out a script whose conclusion is already determined, he can have no free will and therefore cannot be morally culpable.  I wonder if he uses this word as a way of shielding his conscience from what he is about to do.

Then he shanks the king, tastefully, off stage.

When he descends from the bloody chamber, he meets Lady Macbeth and their dialogue reflects their traumatized state:

MACBETH I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?

LADY MACBETH  I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. Did not you speak?

MACBETH  When?

LADY MACBETH Now.

MACBETH  As I descended?

LADY MACBETH Ay.

MACBETH Hark!

Their speech breaks down into clipped, staccato words and phrases.  The tempo is rapid and breathless.  Macbeth then begins to break down, confessing that he heard hallucinatory voices damning him and condemning him to eternal sleeplessness.  Lady Macbeth, contrarily, becomes steely and almost parents Macbeth: “Go get some water And wash this filthy witness from your hand.”  She urges him twice to wash his hands, then, when they hear knocking at the gate, she directs him to bed.

The knocking is answered by the Porter in the sole passage of comic relief in the play.  On his way to answering the door, he imagines he’s the doorman at the gates of Hell (again, Shakespeare not being subtle) and greets all the people he imagines will find their way to the everlasting bonfire.  One in particular is interesting for our little chat.  The Porter imagines an equivocator approaching the infernal realm:

Faith, here’s an equivocator

 that could swear in both the scales against either

 scale, who committed treason enough for God’s

 sake yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in,

 equivocator. 

This probably alludes to the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet, one of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot who, as a Catholic, was forbidden to lie to his questioners, but was allowed to answer equivocally.  He may be a terrorist, but at least he’s no liar!  He was hanged, drawn, and quartered anyway.

The Porter then admits Macduff, the Thane of Fife and hero of the story with a few other noble men and retainers.  He makes a few jokes about drunkenness and erectile dysfunction, then shuffles off.  Duncan’s body is discovered and in a fury, Macbeth kills the guards before they can defend themselves.  This makes Macduff and Banquo rather suspicious.  Malcolm and Donalbain, the king’s sons, flee to England and Ireland respectively in fear of their lives.

Macbeth then leaves for Scone to be crowned king.  Macduff does not attend, returning to Fife.  Macbeth plans a coronation supper for all the Scottish nobility, but before the appetizers, he hires two men to kill Banquo and his son Fleance, for it seems only now has Macbeth realized that Banquo is a threat: 

If ’t be so,

 For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind;

 For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered,

. . . To make them kings, the seeds of Banquo kings.

Catch the gardening reference there – seeds instead of sons?  Not only, however, has King Macbeth turned upon his friend, but for the first time he has proceeded without prompting from his wife.  He tells her that tonight, “There will be done a deed of dreadful note.”  And she asks: “What’s to be done?”  She doesn’t know.  And he responds, I think, with demeaning condescension: “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, till thou applaud the deed.”

A “chuck” is a baby bird, a chick.  Interestingly, this is only one of the several animal images Macbeth uses in this scene and, indeed, will use for the rest of the play.  In this scene alone, Act 3, scene 2, for those keeping score, Macbeth refers to snakes, bats, beetles, rooks, and scorpions.  All these animals are either predators or scavengers, they either kill or feed on the dead.  This is who Macbeth is now – as king, far from becoming so much more the man, as Lady M envisioned, he has become the beast he feared.  Gone are the clothing images, Macbeth has been revealed inhuman.

At the banquet that night, Macduff is conspicuously absent, but the ghost of the murdered Banquo torments Macbeth before the entire country’s nobility.  Fleance, Banquo’s son, has escaped the assassins and escaped the play.  We never do hear from him again. Lady Macbeth feebly tries to cover for her husband’s ranting outbursts and the guests retire.  She repeatedly questions his manhood – at least three times by my count, and he tacitly agrees that his behavior is feminized.  Macbeth’s sleep deprivation and paranoia drive him once again to the witches, who summon three surreal apparitions to foretell his future.

The first apparition is a warrior’s helmet who warns him: “Beware Macduff!  Beware the Thane of Fife!”  Macbeth agrees, commenting that he has long suspected Macduff’s allegiance and deciding to kill him..  The second apparition is a blood-soaked child, who assures the King that “none of woman born shall harm Macbeth.”  Macbeth likes this one, ‘cause, like, everybody is born of woman, so I’m totally safe.  I don’t even have to kill Macduff now . . . ah, I’ll kill him anyway.  Thirdly, a crowned child carrying a tree appears with this cryptic message: “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him.”  Macbeth’s mind is blown: trees don’t walk, so I’m invincible!  Finally, an image of eight kings, who all resemble Banquo, stretch out into the future.  Why eight?  Well, because King James the VI of Scotland and I of England claimed to be the 9th generation descendent of the historical Banquo (which presented a bit of a puzzler for Shakespeare, since in Holinshed's Chronicles, Banquo is clearly a scoundrel who assists in Duncan’s downfall.  One can imagine Bill’s marginal note: “Must change that!”).  So does the witches’ prophecy come true?  All theatre-goers had to do at the time was look up at the luxury box.  There was the proof.

Let’s pause here to dwell on a couple of points.  In this scene, Macbeth has clearly abandoned whatever capacity for reason he may have had.  Not that he was ever a great thinker, but early in the play he does spend some time trying to dispassionately consider the best course of action and its consequences.  He still considered a future.  But now, as an animalistic king, he only considers the immediate present: he has no future and no past.  Lady Macbeth presaged this when her husband first told her of Duncan’s arrival.  She said, “I feel now the future in the instant.”  Time collapses upon them.  In this consultation with the witches, he only really hears or processes what is being said to him right now.  The warning about Macduff is basically abandoned as soon as the next, seemingly salubrious, prophecy is received.  He does not realize that these prophecies are self-contradictory; he has no capacity for equivocal language, for figures of speech.  

His resolution to attack Fife at the end of scene, a move which lacks all reason – there is nothing to gain or to protect by murdering Macduff’s wife and children – explicitly occurs without rational consideration: “From this moment the very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand. And even now, to crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done.”  There is no time between intention and execution.  All is immediate.

Unfortunately, I think the scene showing the murder of Lady Macduff and her son kind of fails dramatically.  I know, I know – what presumption!  But we only meet these characters just as they’re about to die, and I don’t feel any sense of loss, really.  But anyway, this act of reckless and wanton violence finally spurs the country to abandon the tyrant and rally to Malcolm.

Macduff meets Malcolm in England and after feeling each other out, Ross arrives to tell Macduff of the slaughter.  There’s a very interesting little moment as Macduff tearfully mourns his family.  Malcolm, a young man full of piss and vinegar, tells him to “dispute it like a man!”  Seems he and Lady M agree on what a man should be.  Macduff retorts: “I shall do so.  But I must also feel it as a man!”  Macduff says, yeah, I’m gonna kill him, but it’s human to grieve, to feel.  

Macbeth, of course, can no longer feel.  Earlier in the scene, Malcolm speaks of the English king’s (that’s Edward the Confessor, monarchy fans) miraculous healing power:

 most miraculous work in this good king,

 Which often since my here-remain in England

 I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven

 Himself best knows, but strangely visited people

 All swoll’n and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,

 The mere despair of surgery, he cures,

 Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,

 Put on with holy prayers; and, ’tis spoken,

 To the succeeding royalty he leaves

 The healing benediction. With this strange virtue,

 He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy,

 And sundry blessings hang about his throne

 That speak him full of grace.

This is called “touching the king’s evil” and it's still a traditional “power” of the English monarch.  Of course, Shakespeare deploys it here to contrast the health-giving English monarchy to the blighting tyranny of Scotland – bit of flattery to the man on the throne, old James 1, and a validation of his dream of uniting the kingdoms into a Great Britain.

We’ve been missing Lady Macbeth, haven’t we?  We’ve not seen her since Banquo crashed her little coronation soiree.  She’s not been at all well.  She’s taken to sleepwalking, desultorily rehearsing the murders of Duncan, Banquo, and the Macduffs.  She carries a candle constantly.  Her maid reports to a doctor that she violently rubs her hands together for 15 minutes at a time, as if washing them.  And in her trance, she reads and responds, over and over again, to a letter.

In what’s called the sleep-walking scene, Shakespeare presents us with a most harrowing portrait of a broken woman.  For the whole play, she was cool, hard, pitiless.  Immediately after the assassination, she warns her troubled husband: “These deeds must not be thought After these ways; so, it will make us mad.”  But while she attempts to suppress the trauma of what she’s done, she brings on her own psychosis.  The doctor says, “infected minds/ To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets."   Indeed.  It will come out one way or the other.  When the Doctor tells the weary husband that her illness is mental, not physical, Macbeth retorts in what I think is one of the most uncanny lines ever.  He says, “Cure her that. Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?”  

In 1915, Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychology, gave this brief and oft-quoted definition of repression, which he saw as the root of mental illness: "The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious.”  There’s a perhaps apocryphal quote from Dr. Freud postulating that “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”  Freud believed that mental illness resulted from the conscious ego – the I – repressing traumatic experiences or memories in an attempt to placate the conscience, or superego.  He develops this theory in the early 2oth century and it has, of course, had its controversies – it was totally dismissed for a while but I understand that some recent neuroscience has begun to validate some of his theories.  At any rate, what blows my mind about Act 5 in Macbeth is that Shakespeare already intuits that insight 400 years earlier.  Macbeth senses that his wife’s “thick-coming fancies” result from a sorrow rooted in her memory, the written troubles of the brain.  And, not for nothing, Macbeth also predicts psychotropic drugs such as antidepressants or antipsychotics when he asks for some “sweet oblivious antidote.”  All this centuries before Freud did his first line of coke.  That’s why Shakespeare is Shakespeare.

Sadly – well, I’m sad, anyway – Lady Macbeth cannot endure her repressed guilt any longer and presumably takes her own life.  In one of the bleakest articulations of nihilism I have ever heard, Macbeth reflects on this passage:

She should have died hereafter.

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

The emptiness is almost unbearable.  He begins with a somewhat ambiguous line: She should have died hereafter.  Depending on how we read it, we get quite different senses of Macbeth’s perhaps still clinging humanity.  If it means – as I must admit, most critics agree it does – that “she would have died anyway at some point,” then surely Macbeth has fully ceased to be human.  Even for his dearest partner of greatness he can summon no emotion.  But if it means “she would have died later,” then we can see what traditional tragic structure would call anagnorisis – the recognition by the tragic hero that this destruction is all his fault, the fruit of his flawed personality. I always think of that moment in Return of the Jedi, when Darth Vader removes his helmet to reveal that little bit of Anakin that survives, the living man in the lifeless machine.

But I admit this more optimistic reading does not gel as nicely with what follows in this speech.  Macbeth has once again become aware of time and those repeated tomorrows emphasize a dreary drudgery.  Early printings hyphenate to-morrow, stressing the “to” as a preposition indicating motion toward, like this endless slog.  He speaks of time, too, as if it were the speech, the language, that so often confounds him: the last syllable.  Death is “dusty” because there is no salvation – we return only to the dust from whence we came.  From the metaphor of life as a play, and we minor actors, he declares that life is a tale told by an idiot that signifies nothing.  If life is a tale, a story, a play – who is the author?  Ourselves?  Are we the idiots?  Or God?  Is God an idiot?

Western society has wrestled with the nihilism of this speech ever since, from the 17th century wars of religion to the world wars and genocides of the 20th century to the bitterness of our own day.  If all is meaningless, what is to stop us indulging our ids?

Yet Macbeth stubbornly clings to life, or to his ego, anyway.  Malcolm’s army, reinforced by English soldiers under the Lord Siward and Northumberland, are joined by rebel Scottish nobles in a siege of Dunsinane, Macbeth’s stronghold.  At Birnam Forest, to shadow their coming, Malcolm instructs each man to “hew him down a bough And bear ’t before him.”  The armies will carry branches before them to hide their numbers – thereby bringing Birnam Wood up Dunsinane Hill!

Bum bum bah!

Here’s a free factoid for you: this is the first written reference to the use of camouflage.  Another point for Big Bill from Warwickshire!

Macduff confronts Macbeth, who has just killed Siward’s son – “Thou wast born of woman!” he mocks – and Macbeth mocks him as well, taunting him with his family’s deaths.  But Macduff retorts, “Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped!”  Ooooh, he was a C-section, not technically born of woman!  

Bum bum bah!

Macbeth finally realizes he should have paid greater attention in literature classes as his inability to detect metaphor and equivocation has undone him.  He curses the witches and the apparitions, the “juggling fiends that palter with us in a double sense!”  Really, I think part of what destroys Macbeth is his literalness.  Language, to his understanding, is nearly always indicative.  Hardly ever does he consider figurative or connotative modes.  And so his head ends up on a pike.  There’s a lesson here, kids, do your homework!

When Malcolm accepts the crown, he says a weird thing.  Before inviting everyone to his coronation at Scone, he declares, “The time is free!”  Strange thing to say after a battle.  But so much of the play has been concerned about time – the future in Banquo’s case, a claustrophobic present in the Macbeths.  Now, the clock starts again, as it were.  We’ve returned to the land of temporal life after this sojourn in Macbeth’s eternal realm of death.  Will Malcolm be a good king?  I think so.  After this battle, the victors comment on how few casualties they lost.  But Siward is informed that his own son was among them.  The father, oddly ungrieved, merely wants to know where his injuries were.  Finding they were on the front of his body (and thus he died confronting the enemy), he almost rejoices at his child’s honorable death.  But Malcolm puts a stop to that.  He says, “He’s worth more sorrow, and that I’ll spend for him.”  Remember when Macduff grieved his loss, and an immature Malcolm told him to sack up and Macduff said to be a man is to be a feeling human?  Well, Malcolm listened to his elders, took the words to heart, rejected the retrogressive gender roles endorsed by Lady Macbeth and others, and here displays the compassion demanded of a just ruler.

pause

So, there you go.  Maybe the darkest tragedy Shakespeare ever wrote.  But what really caused it?  As I say, most folks will immediately point to Macbeth’s ambition as his hamartia, his tragic flaw.  Others might say he was simply a marionette for the witches, just a victim of their curses.  After all, King James was a great believer in the malevolence of witches, even writing an influential philosophical dissertation on the subject in 1597 called Demonology (and not influential in a good way, in case you were wondering.  The King’s endorsement perhaps escalated the witch hysteria and persecutions of the coming century, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocents).  But I don’t blame the witches for a second.  To really make that case, you have to accept Act 3 scene 5, in which the witch queen Hecate chastises the Weird Sisters for not letting her in on the prank as authoritative – and it’s not.  Thomas Middleton added that scene later to perhaps pad out a short script and get in a crowd-pleasing, toe-tapping musical number.  What about the language thing I mentioned a couple of times?  Yeah, I do think Macbeth’s inability to intellectually process the “fair is foul” paradox is a key factor.

But what of the cause?  I’m going to make a perhaps radical suggestion.  Ambition was not the cause of the tragedy.  At least, not selfish ambition.  Do you not find it odd that, for all the assumption that Macbeth lusts for glory, he never mentions his attraction to political power?  Never.  He never says how great it will be to be powerful, to be ultra-wealthy, to have grand palaces and servants and champagne-filled bathtubs and dancing girls.  Never.  He only ever mentions it in the letter to his wife.  He writes: “This have I thought good to deliver

 thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou might’st not lose the dues of rejoicing by being ignorant of what greatness is promised thee.”  He wants it for her.  He wants to be the best man he can be for her.  And she wants it for him too.  She says he “shalt be what thou art promised.”  I wonder if this ties into her childlessness.  In the medieval and early modern world, a noble woman’s chief job was to produce an heir for the noble man.  This Lady Macbeth cannot do, so perhaps making him king is her recompense to him.  I think that Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is a love story.

Think about that next time you watch the Scottish play.  Thanks, everyone, for listening and for all your support, whether that’s positive reviews on your podcast platform, recommending the show to friends, or a financial donation.  I appreciate it all.  Till next time, be safe.